A Participatory System to Sense the Road Conditions

The monitoring of road conditions and surface anomalies such as potholes, bumps etc., has shown a great importance in the safety and comfort of road users from pedestrian to drivers. Detection and identification of such road anomalies not only reduces the causes of road accidents but also avoid vehicle damages. This can provision the management authorities to keep a track of road conditions along with maintenance of roads. Monitoring the road conditions is a challenging task and potholes detection plays an important role in the repairing of asphalt road surface. Many approaches exist to collect data about road surface conditions, however most of these approaches are low-speed human visual inspection or approaches that uses advanced and costly measuring equipments. Therefore, there is a need to develop a cost effective system that can manages these kind of issues. In this paper, a Participatory Sensing system based on raspberry pi is designed and developed to detect and record road surface anomalies that are measured by the inertial measurement unit (IMU) and GPS sensor. An android application is also designed and developed to alert the user from an upcoming high-intensity rough area on the road. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol is used to publish and subscribe data from raspberry pi to data servers.